1. Beauty
Female faces from afar (less details visible) look nicer than from close by (pores, imperfections visible).
Makeup serves the same purpose: By removing details (imperfect skin) it shows a smoothed-out superficiality, an ideal.
Female nylon stocking works the same: Imperfections of the leg's surface are hidden and replaced with a perfect, smoothed-out illusion.
(Sidenote: In after WW2-Germany silk/Nylon stockings were extremely scarce, as the silk/Nylon was needed for the War effort (parachutes); they were much more available in the US (Nylon was invented + produced there), and because such stockings increase female sexual desirability for males to such a high degree (increases female power and options), many German women prostituted themselves for those stockings with US soldiers; the exchange rate was roughly the weight of the stockin

I would beg to differ. Absolute perfection can be totally fake and doll type of girls are repulsive from the aspect of pure animal, instinctual desirability, for alas they lack the necessary qualities to be parents. On the contrary, slightly hairy yet muscular, developed women legs indicate better proneness to survival, adaptation and effort for the continuity of the human species and a better reliability as potential parent.

Nylon stockings as a currency is no rarity in times of catastrophe. During crisis all logic is turned off and this wouldn't be the best example in sociology of human behaviorism IMHO.

But your argument concerning paintings was good.

Edited by Anderson, 16 December 2017 - 10:52 AM.

"I really perceive that vanity about which most men merely prate — the vanity of the human or temporal life. I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary — and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain — that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future — that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves — nor are we with our posterity. I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual, in man the mass."...

If you don't have any portals yet, or if the fps dip is be around 10 fps, then sure. But that approach kind of never works in the long run. You'll get to a point where you'd have to delete lights and models, and thus decrease visual quality of your scene. You will be very reluctant to do so. It kind of already happened with Briarwood Manor, so you already know how it's like. There's a good lesson from industry veterans on that, which comes down to "always playable, always at performance" motto. Nobody asks you to employ the whole LEAN process in your level design, but a lot of these points are actually super-helpful, even with small projects like fan missions:

Yeah, that's the pro approach. But seriously, many mappers do this, and thus we have quiet some maps with performance issues.

then scale back to give best performance

I am not sure I understand what you mean by "scaling back".

use the LOD to refine it.

LOD has to be planned to begin with. If you want to do it at the end, it means that you will have to replace every entity in your map where you want to use it on and to convert anything that isn't an entity yet to be able to use it on. A very time-consuming and inefficient approach.

Performance though is a long long way away

Performance should be one of the first things to consider, especially when planning a map where you know that performance will be an issue.

I can understand your building style, as it is exactly the same way that I have build my missions back in the day. And I ran into performance issues, too, although those were indoor areas.

When aiming to create something apart from the "standard", you really have to adopt your building style to that. This is no criticism, just a good advice.

I wholeheartedly approve of making ambitious maps. The future will vindicate the effort. Nice-looking work, too!

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

LOD has to be planned to begin with. If you want to do it at the end, it means that you will have to replace every entity in your map where you want to use it on and to convert anything that isn't an entity yet to be able to use it on. A very time-consuming and inefficient approach.

It's actually not as hard as that makes it sound. Even if you're using models or brushwork that doesn't have LOD entities already made, you can always use the hide_distance command and fake your own LOD. For example, you could take a screenshot of those distant buildings, make a texture out of them, and then put a thin brush with that texture behind the building. Then, the entire face of the building, lights and all, could be hidden at a certain distance, to be replaced with the single textured brush and a single light.

Speaking about performance, and this is probably a question to our lovely programmers: what actually prevents us from having more drawcalls per scene available? Engine limitations? OpenGL API? Other?

I can have around 3000-4000 DCs on my system, before FPS starts to go down. To put this in some perspective, in 3dmark API overhead test I got to around 35 000 drawcalls, in single-threaded DX11, before FPS dropped below 60. That's 10x more. Is there any way to get more from our hardware?

I think that's kind of specific to your machine, Spring. Or to mine. My shadow range can differ from scene to scene, but DCs have to be more or less on the same level.

+1

That's interesting. I wonder how much that varies from machine to machine? Conventional wisdom has always said that it's the number of lights (and therefore shadows) that impacts fps in idTech4, and I've confirmed that on my machine, at least. As long as shadows are less than 80k, drawcalls can go quite high. But once shadows get over about 120k, even quite low drawcalls affect performance.

I thought that, since DCs are part of CPU -> GPU pipeline, that's the weakest link in any system. In my tests I could have something like 230k shadow tris in one scene. Recommended is, as you say 80-100k, so that might scale with GPU / better drivers? But max DC was always around 3k–3,5k for me, regardless of other values.

It's actually not as hard as that makes it sound. Even if you're using models or brushwork that doesn't have LOD entities already made, you can always use the hide_distance command and fake your own LOD. For example, you could take a screenshot of those distant buildings, make a texture out of them, and then put a thin brush with that texture behind the building. Then, the entire face of the building, lights and all, could be hidden at a certain distance, to be replaced with the single textured brush and a single light.

You can do this. But this way you jump from high detailed to very low detailed without anything in between. And if the performance requires it, you will have to do this on rather short distances. Not optimal. And if you know you are going to use it anyway, I don't see why you shouldn't do so to begin with.

RE drawcall/shadow counts: Both will affect performance once a certain limit is hit. Where those limits are is probably highly depending on the hardware used (and probably the drivers as well) as already pointed out. I guess the fact that the performance drops at considerable lower drawcalls then it is the case with modern engines will probably be the way how the engine handles the data. The engine was build with the hardware in mind that was available back in the day, and modern engines aim for modern hardware. And we are talking about more then ten years of development. I fairly doubt clockrates and memory sizes are all that have changed over the time

I wholeheartedly approve of making ambitious maps.

I do so too. But higher ambitions always means more work. And ignoring that fact will lead to unsatisfying results.